Make Your Site SpEEdy

How to improve the performance of your ExpressionEngine website. Written by me, with contributions from the awesome attendees at the BostonEErs September 2010 event: http://www.meetup.com/BostonEErs/calendar/14247978/

7.
5
Database queries
can be seen by enabling EE’s output proﬁler. Note that this doesn’t tell us
how long a single query takes to run, but it does show us the full query.
In EE 1.6.x’s Control Panel:
Admin › System Preferences › Output and Debugging Preferences
In EE 2.1’s Control Panel:
Admin › System Administration › Output and Debugging

11.
1
Browser rendering time optimizations
• Make your Javascript and CSS more efﬁcient, so the browser
is able to render (draw) the completed page more quickly.
• For writing faster CSS, check out OOCSS:
http://wiki.github.com/stubbornella/oocss/
• For writing faster JavaScript, speed-test snippets using JSPerf:
http://jsperf.com/

12.
2
Component transmission time optimizations
• Minify and concatenate all JavaScript into a single ﬁle, and
minify and concatenate all CSS into a single ﬁle.
• If you keep your Javascript and CSS in EE templates, concatenate these
assets using this technique: http://easy-reader.net/archives/2010/07/11/
template-based-asset-munging-in-expressionengine
• To concatenate and minify JS/CSS in EE templates, try SL Combinator
http://experienceinternet.co.uk/software/sl-combinator/docs/, which uses
an old version of Minify http://code.google.com/p/minify/
• If you keep your JS and CSS assets outside of EE, use Minify http://
code.google.com/p/minify/

13.
2
Component transmission time optimizations (con’t)
• Serve optimized images.
• Prevent content maintainers from uploading content images that are too
large by using http://www.lumis.com/page/imgsizer/
• Run all site image assets through http://smush.it/ to reduce ﬁlesize as
much as possible.
• Where possible, combine (aka sprite) site image assets.
• Enable GZIP compression in EE.
In EE 1.6.x’s Control Panel:
Admin › System Preferences › In EE 2.1’s Control Panel:
Output and Debugging Preferences Admin › System Administration › Output and Debugging